You Went No Contact and Somehow Ended Up Playing Hide-and-Seek

One day you decide to go no contact, which sounds simple enough. No messages, no calls, no little “I just thought of you” wandering innocently across the phone at 11:05 p.m. You are stepping away, closing the door and getting on with things.

Very sensible.

Except silence has a funny way of turning into something else when feelings are involved. A few days in, everything looks perfectly normal from the outside, while emotionally you have tucked yourself behind a rather elegant curtain and started waiting to see whether he notices you are gone.

Well, you didn’t mean to start a game. Of course you didn’t. You simply decided to go quiet. Fair enough.

And yet here you are, hidden beautifully, listening for footsteps.

Surely He Is Going to Come Looking

At first, it feels rather glamorous. You haven’t contacted him once, and from the outside you look wonderfully composed. The only tiny flaw in this otherwise magnificent performance is that some part of you is still listening for footsteps, because surely if you are going to disappear this elegantly, somebody ought to notice, right?

So, in the version of hide-and-seek happening in your head, he has already noticed the silence and is somewhere realizing that your absence is becoming a rather big deal.

Any minute now.

This is the funny part. You can be completely committed to not contacting him while still feeling that he should be responding rather enthusiastically to the fact that you are gone.

Which is how you end up behind the curtain thinking, I am absolutely not coming out! And for a few glorious minutes, this feels wonderfully decisive... but almost immediately, another thought slips in: Has he even started looking?

Meanwhile, the phone remains quiet, and before long the silence starts to feel strangely personal. Excuse me, but you disappeared. He is simply respecting the disappearance, which is not generally considered cheating at hide-and-seek.

He Is Taking an Awfully Long Time

After a while, though, another thought wanders in: maybe no contact isn’t working? But if it is supposed to be working at something, what exactly is it supposed to do?

Because if the private hope was that silence would make him miss you so much that he came running back through three zip codes, then every quiet day now starts to feel slightly disappointing.

Day twelve.

Nothing.

Day eighteen.

Still nothing.

And by day twenty-three, you find yourself personally offended by no contact for producing, of all things, no contact.

The annoying part is that ordinary life just carries on and gives you no useful clues whatsoever. He may be thinking about you. He may not. He may miss you and still stay quiet. Who knows?

Well, he may be eating a sandwich.

This is extremely unhelpful.

Hide-and-seek would be much easier if everybody occasionally called out from wherever they were and explained what was going on. Instead, you are left behind the curtain trying to work out whether silence means he is devastated, indifferent, confused, respectful, stubborn or simply at the gym.

That is quite a lot to ask from one quiet phone.

Then You Accidentally Make a Noise

And then comes the other great no-contact panic: you text him. Maybe it is only one sentence. Maybe he texts first and you answer, or maybe you have a weak moment and send something you immediately wish could be chased down the street and brought back.

Oh no. The game is ruined! Thirty-two days of perfect silence, destroyed by six words and an emoji.

And suddenly, no contact starts behaving like a very strict board game. One wrong move and you are mentally dragging all the little pieces back to START, convinced that thirty-two perfectly respectable days have somehow been ruined.

Except, of course, nothing actually exploded. You sent a message. That is all. Yet when you have spent weeks treating silence like a game with very important rules, one tiny text can feel remarkably similar to being caught behind the curtain with your feet showing.

And this is where the whole thing begins to look rather funny from a little distance. You disappeared, waited patiently to see whether he would come looking, and then worried that one small sound had spoiled everything. Meanwhile, the poor man may not even have known there was a game.

No wonder the rules became confusing. You invented most of them after you started playing, while he may not even have known there was a game.

And the funniest part?

Of course he wasn’t counting to a hundred. Nobody told him he was supposed to be playing.